Seasons Of Our Lives
Sermon by Steve Edington
January 6, 2008
I considered a single New Year's Resolution for 2008 and then quickly set it aside. I don't make them anyway so why start now? The Resolution was to not mention any work by Jack Kerouac for a whole year - only to realize that I'd been planning on using a passage from his work for my first sermon of 2008. This is why I don't make resolutions - especially ones that'll fence me in, as this one would have. So, to begin:
In the concluding paragraph of On the Road Mr. Kerouac offers a poetic ode, although written in prose form, to the America he's been traveling back and forth across for the 3-4 years prior to his writing his first complete draft of the novel. He romantically writes about the evening star shedding "sparkler dims on the prairie" and "blessing the rivers" and cupping the mountain peaks and "folding the final shore in" - in all of this Walt Whitmanesque type of language. But then, when he gets close to the end of that final paragraph, he throws in a line that seems to throw it all off as he writes, "And nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody but the forlorn rags of growing old." It's a little jarring. One moment we're sailing along over prairies, rivers, mountain peaks, and shores, only to suddenly get whacked in the head by the "forlorn rags of growing old."
Kerouac's central character in the book gets something of the same treatment. Throughout the text we get Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise's crazed companion of the road. A wild, exasperating, untamed - and, more often than not, hugely irresponsible - free spirit who opens up the shy and introspective Sal (who is Kerouac's persona) to what Sal calls "joy, kicks, and darkness." But the last we see of Dean in the book - who is based on the real life person of Neal Cassady - he's standing alone on a New York City street corner wearing what Kerouac describes as a "ragged, moth-eaten overcoat," while Sal Paradise and the new woman in his life and another couple ride off in a limo to a concert.
The forlorn rags of growing old...Dean alone in a ragged moth-eaten overcoat...this is where Kerouac's road actually ends. It baffles me to this day how the critics of this book who ridiculed and dismissed it as little more than a tribute to mindless hedonism and an attempt to seduce an entire generation into to depths of depravity and amorality (that was Norman Podhoretz's take anyway), could not see where Jack was really going with it. He was trying to show both the overlay and the underlay of the road, and by extension, of the life journey. The overlay is that of joy and exuberance and craziness, and believing that what you are searching and reaching for is somewhere out there if you can just get out there and track it down. Somewhere along the way "I would find the pearl" as Kerouac's Sal Paradise puts it.
But there's also an underlay in this book of tragedy and loss and sadness; of the road and life slipping by with the specter of nothing but meaninglessness at the end: Dean alone in a ragged moth-eaten overcoat...the forlorn rags of growing old. At the age of 29, which was his age when he wrote his signature novel, Kerouac was able to see these two sides of the road. The tragic irony of his life is that he succumbed to the road's shadow side once the demons of success and celebrity finally came his way. When Kerouac wrote that final paragraph he only had 18 years left for himself.
Okay, so what does any of this have to do with tracking the seasons of one's life? I offer this personal reflection: One of the ways I've tracked my own life journey and road has been to read On the Road at different times in my life. My experience in doing so is quite similar to that of others I've been in conversation with who have done the same thing. You read the book in your 20s and you key into the enthusiasm and the wildness and the craziness. You key into the hope and the promise of finding your own "pearl" somewhere along the way; and you just want to get out there and go for it. To go back to the very same text at subsequent stages in one's life, as I've found for myself anyway, is to key into the novel's more sobering underlay. It is to finally hear the questions the character Carlo Marx - who is based on Allen Ginsberg - finally confronts the madcap protagonists with: "What is the meaning of this voyage...I mean, man, whither goest thou...in thy shiny new car?"
I find I am still attracted and excited, in a certain kind of way, to the wild and crazy side of On the Road whenever I read it. But what I've also come to see, as I periodically revisit this text, is that part of the life road and journey is the acceptance of loss, the acceptance that tragedy is as much a part of the life journey as is joy. I come to believe that a deliberative and dedicated pursuit of one's pearl, knowing that there will be setbacks and disappointments in that pursuit, is in the end more rewarding than a desperate kind of reaching and grasping after that pearl.
I think on these things as another year, 2008 this time around, comes upon us. It's just another day on the calendar, in the midst of a frigid and snowy winter. But we human beings are creatures who mark the passing of time - maybe because one of the peculiarities of our species is that we're uniquely aware of the passing of time - and counting the years is one way we do it.
Several years ago one of my friends and colleagues in the UU ministry, the Rev. Chuck Gaines - now long into retirement down in Arizona - wrote a little Christmas meditation which, while done in a radically different style from On the Road, offers a similar message to the one I've just been sharing. I'm going to turn to it now since it works equally well as a New Years meditation.
Chuck wrote: "I have lived more than half the Christmases I shall ever see and I know I won't get everything I want or have hoped for." The three wants and hopes - his pearl if you will - that he recounts are 1) Immortality; 2) Being able to control life "so that I'd never feel hurt or sad or afraid." and 3) "Peace on earth and a world where hunger, poverty, racism, and ignorance would be eliminated." On one level it's pretty irrational to want or expect such things - to believe that such a pearl is really out there. But on some level these are very widespread human yearnings. So, let's take them one at a time.
Rev. Gaines is being deliberately tongue-in-cheek in saying he wanted immortality. We all know, usually before our age even hits double-digits, that we're not around forever. But there is a time in one's life when you feel you have all the time you'll need to accomplish all you want to do, which is a kind of de facto immortality. But as the seasons of our lives move along we find that part of the growth process comes in casting off some of our long held hopes and expectations in ways that can actually lighten the life journey. This is the theme, in fact, of a wonderful book written many years ago by Judith Viorst called Necessary Losses. Its subtitle is "The loves, illusions, dependencies, and impossible expectations that all of us have to give up in order to grow." If you do make New Years resolutions, resolving to read this book would not be a bad one at all. I'll just read a few selections from a chapter Ms. Viorst titles "Shifting Images."
"We start to feel a time of letting go, of one thing and another. Our waistlines, our vigor, our 20/20 vision, our trust in justice. We give up hoping to read all the books we'd once vowed to read and go all the places we once vowed to visit. We even give up hoping that we will succeed in being underweight - or immortal...We feel shaken...we do not feel safe...Suddenly our friends, if not us, are having divorces, heart attacks, cancer. Some - even our age - have died. As we acquire new aches and pains our health care is, of necessity, supplied by internists, cardiologists, dermatologists, podiatrists, urologists, gynecologists, and psychiatrists, from all of whom we want a second opinion - a second opinion that says, "Don't worry, you're going to live forever."
Of course, no such opinion exists. Alluding to what I just said, I don't think it's actual immortality we want so much as the time we need to see all of our hopes realized - to once and for all find our pearl. But realizing we do not have that time is one of the "necessary losses" that Ms. Viorst identifies. It is a necessary loss because it makes us focus on what we really do want and on who and what we really want to be. Having disavowed New Years resolutions for myself, I'll now demonstrate enough chutzpah to suggest yet another one for you: Make a personal wish or hope list for yourself, and then one of the hopes and expectations you are ready to relinquish at whatever season of your life you may find yourselves. You may find it quite liberating. It may allow you to see what it truly worthy of your hopes and desires in the year ahead.
Number Two on Rev. Gaines list (quoting him): "I never asked to be God, but I expected to be able to control life so that I'd never be hurt or feel sad or afraid." It is not an irrational hope or expectation to want to live with a healthy level of self-respect and to be at peace with oneself and with your personal past. Having this does give you a necessary measure of control over your life in a way that helps keep you from being manipulated or used.
But the idea of being able to control our lives, and Life in general, to the point of never being hurt or feeling pain or despair or sadness may not be really be a pearl you want. You see, the only way to get such a pearl would be to eliminate all the risk factors in your life, to never invest yourselves in the lives of others, to never care; it would mean, in effect, ceasing to be human. "A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries" as Paul Simon once reminded us. Control of life is a hope you want to see realized up to a point, but only up to a point because it is a willingness to let go and be vulnerable to such things as hurt and fear and sadness and loss which, ironically enough, makes genuine human relationships possible in the first place.
Then Chuck's third hope: "I expected peace on earth and a world where hunger, poverty, racism, and ignorance would be eradicated." Here again, is a bit of tongue in cheek. We in the liberal tradition do have a way of hoping and expecting things to get better - despite a temporary setback here and there. A hope that does need to be revisited over the course of the seasons of our lives is one that concerns itself with the kind of world we will leave for those who come after us. To re-echo Judith Viorst here, perhaps another necessary loss is to drop the idea of ever living in a completely fair, sane, just, and loving world.
I really do not mean this as a statement of despair or of a loss of hope or of a complete surrender to tragedy. I say it instead out of a recognition that we live in a world of human beings - beings with our brokenness and wholeness, with our dreams and our fears, with our kindness and our cruelty, with our reverence for life and our disregard of it. So long as such a conglomerate of attributes resides in me - as I know it does - and, if I may daresay, reside in each of us, then we will live in an imperfect world with our imperfect selves. Believe it or not, I mean that as a positive and hope-full statement. When we lose the expectation or hope of perfection - for ourselves, for others, and for our world at large, we are then able to bring the best of who we are to both our personal relationships and to our large world, with the best energy we have.
"Something's lost and something's gained in living everyday," as Joni Mitchell once reminded us. And a couple of thousand years before Ms. Mitchell, Jesus said something about the necessity of losing one's life in order to find it. I think that's the paradox we learn to live in as the seasons of our lives go by. We have to decide, to choose, what it is we want and need to let go of - to lose - in order to be about finding what we truly want and need, to find what the nature of the pearl really is. Part of continuing to grow - throughout the whole life cycle - is learning to live in the push and pull of the joy and exuberance and excitement that life does offer, and that many writers and poets have celebrated; and in the empty moments and the vacant places we'll also encounter, and which our writers and poets also tell us about.
As we move through these seasons with their joys and their losses - with their grace and with their tragedy - having a community like this one where we can bring those lives, at whatever stage and condition they may be, is crucial I feel. So one resolution I will make, and which I invite you to join me in, is that we will continue to grow this wonderful liberal religious community and congregation we have here, so that those who are now in our midst and those who will come into our midst may grow their lives as well. Perhaps we can be the pearl that others seek and need.
Stephen Edington
January 6, 2008
